Leadership & Service
Director, School of Social, Political, and Historical Research (2026–2030)
Ian Milligan is the inaugural Director of the School of Social, Political, and Historical Research, created through the University of Waterloo Faculty of Arts’ reorganization into six schools. The School brings together seven departments: Anthropology, Classical Studies, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Religious Studies, and Sociology & Legal Studies.
Associate Vice-President, Research Oversight & Integrity (2022–2026)
As Associate Vice-President in the Office of Research, and a member of the University’s Executive Council, he was responsible for research ethics, compliance, safeguarding research, research health & safety, animal care, bibliometrics, emergency research issues, and campus research awards. He co-led the University’s Research Data Management strategy through to implementation, chaired the Research Operations Council, the UW/SSHRC Grants Committee, and the Working Group on Bibliometrics, and co-chaired the Task Force on Institutional Partnerships.
Principal Investigator, Archives Unleashed (2017–2023)
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Archives Unleashed brought together historians, librarians, and computer scientists to build tools for analyzing web archives at scale. The project ran eight datathons, at institutions including the Library of Congress, the British Library, and Columbia University, and its platform is now offered as a service by the Internet Archive.
University Governance
- Member, University of Waterloo Executive Council (2022–present)
- Elected Faculty Representative, Board of Governors (2020–2022)
- Senator, University of Waterloo Senate (2018–2022; two elected terms)
- Member, Senate Graduate and Research Council (2022–2026)
- Member, Faculty of Arts Tenure and Promotion Committee (2018–2021)
- Member, University Honorary Degrees Committee (2019–2020)
Research Funding & Policy
- Chair, SSHRC Insight Development Grants Committee, History (2021–2023)
- Publications Committee, Awards to Scholarly Publications Program (2020–2023)
- Expert Review Committee for Digital Libraries, Canada Foundation for Innovation (2020)
- New Frontiers in Research Fund committee (2019)
- Research Data Management Working Group, New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization (2020–2022)
Archives & Cultural Memory
- Canadian Commission for UNESCO, Memory of the World Advisory Committee (2022–present)
- UCLA Library, Modern Endangered Archives Program board (2024–present)
- Library and Archives Canada, Acquisitions Advisory Committee (2015–2022; two terms)
- Canadian Research Knowledge Network, Preservation and Access Committee (2018–2023; two terms)
- Library of Congress, Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud advisory board (2019–present)
Editorial
- Co-Editor, Internet Histories (2016–present)
- Editor, Programming Historian (2012–2018)
- Founding Co-Editor, ActiveHistory.ca (2009–2015)
- Steering Committee (elected), ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (2019–2022); Co-Program Chair, JCDL 2017
- Editorial boards: Journal of Digital History, International Journal on Digital Libraries, Journal of Cultural Analytics